'the richness of the world ... and, often, its inscrutability'

Whenever parts of a system interfere or cooperate with each other, there are nonlinear interactions taking place. Most of everyday life is spectacularly nonlinear; if you listen to your two favorite songs at the same time, you won’t get double the pleasure. The same goes for consuming alcohol and drugs, where the interaction effects can be deadly. By contrast, peanut butter and jelly are better together. They don’t just add up—they synergize. 

Nonlinearity is responsible for the richness of the world, for its beauty and complexity and, often, its inscrutability. For example, all of biology is nonlinear; so is sociology. That’s why the soft sciences are hard—and the last to be mathematized. Because of nonlinearity, there’s nothing soft about them. 

[…] 

Sofia Kovalevskaya helped us understand how different the world appears when we finally face up to nonlinearity. She realized that nonlinearity places limits on human hubris. When a system is nonlinear, its behavior can be impossible to forecast with formulas, even though that behavior is completely determined. In other words, determinism does not imply predictability. It took the motion of a top—a child’s plaything—to make us more humble about what we can ever hope to know.

—Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers (2019)

'The current generation now sees everything clearly'

There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king’s mansions! Broader and more splendid than all the other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

'knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace'

He capped the pen. It was a service someone had to perform, he felt. A translation service. What was all this, but a modern tower of Babel? Here was someone speaking nothing but dance, and someone else speaking paint, and someone speaking poetry, and someone speaking music. And what were they trying to express, but the inexpressible? If there existed words, regular words, to say what they were aiming at, then why would they even need to do what they did? Why were they all living here, knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace? The ink was insufficient as anything else, but perhaps it was a start. If he'd been a sculptor, he'd have sculpted it for them: Look! There! Love.

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)

'their mighty parturition'

Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.

—Walt Whitman, "Prayer of Columbus" (1874/1881)

'unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours'

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life?

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours,
Cold earth, the place of graves.)

—Walt Whitman, "Passage to India" (1868/1871)

'I wish God had made me vaster myself'

—Now events of this moment are so mad that of course I can't keep up but worse they're as though they were fond memories that from my peaceful hacienda or Proust-bed I was trying to recall in toto but couldn't because like the real world so vast, so delugingly vast, I wish God had made me vaster myself—I wish I had ten personalities, one hundred golden brains, far more ports than are ports, more energy than the river, but I must struggle to live it all, and on foot, and in these little crepesole shoes.

—Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1951-'52)

'I value invention highly, and hardly anyone else does.'

INTERVIEWER

What sets you apart, do you think, from other American writers? 

VIDAL

My interest in Western civilization. Except for Thornton Wilder, I can think of no contemporary American who has any interest in what happened before the long present he lives in, and records. Also, perhaps paradoxically, I value invention highly, and hardly anyone else does. I don’t think I have ever met an American novelist who didn’t, sooner or later, say when discussing his own work, “Well, I really knew someone exactly like that. That was the way it happened, the way I wrote it.” He is terrified that you might think he actually made up a character, that what he writes might not be literally as opposed to imaginatively true. I think part of the bewilderment American book-chat writers have with me is that they realize that there’s something strange going on that ought not to be going on—that Myra Breckinridge might just possibly be a work of the imagination. “You mean you never knew anyone like that? Well, if you didn’t, how could you write it?”

—Gore Vidal, The Art of Fiction, The Paris Review (No. 59, Fall 1974)

'such helpless novices'

. . . how is it possible to live when after all the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist? . . . I did not manage to express all of my astonishment over the fact that men have had for thousands of years to deal with life (not to mention God), and yet towards these first most immediate problems strictly speaking, these only problems (for what else have we to do, today still and for how long to come?) they remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable. Isn't that incomprehensible?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Nov. 8, 1915, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 2, 1910–1926 (trans. Greene & Norton 1948)

The resistance of matter.

He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go” . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can’t be an expert at everything . . . You’ve got to resign yourself . . .

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)

'a high price for living too long with a single dream'

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . .

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom'

"Oh, nothing, of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile. "Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me; and I begin to suspect that a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been, from what he sees them to be, now."

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)